Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us

by Alison Mariella Désir

When we were together, we didn’t have to be the best or the brightest for acceptance; we could be silly, sometimes ignorant; we could let loose, just be normal.

It was a layering that began with the constant hum of racism, of whiteness. There was no name-calling, no overt anti-Blackness, simply the fact of existing in white spaces where the real me was invisible. The persistent feeling of not belonging, of feeling deficient, and not being seen was always inside me, just below the surface. Ashton, who didn’t see me, either, brought it all to the surface, pushing me over the edge.

When you walk around the world feeling like you don’t belong as a baseline, life hits you differently. Everything feels like a failure,

History is told by the people in power, but that does not make it the truth. Who chooses what is good and worthy is a product of worldview, not fact.

I chose to expose how the narrative of Haiti in the U.S. was an intentional project of white supremacy. I wrote how Haiti has been portrayed as poor, diseased, and without a future, because it was the only successful revolt by enslaved people, and it will be paying the price for that radical act forever. If Haiti had become a thriving country, what would it have signaled to other enslaved people, other nations under colonial or imperial rule? You can unseat white supremacy. That was not something the world wanted anybody to think.

This was where the lessons of running crossed over into life for me: the ability to see myself in a future I was planning for and to trust in my ability to get myself there.

Focus on what is in your control. Stay in the present. Life has meaning. It seemed as if some higher power were handing me wisdom, but it was movement. There is a reason to live. The reason to live is simply to live!

Fitness is stored in the body and will be there on race day. “It’s simple: if you run on it, it will get worse. If you don’t run on it, it will get better,” he said.

My depression had lifted, but I still believed I had to do every workout in order to finish the marathon; I had to do everything right. But I remembered what he said—if you run, it will get worse—and convinced myself that not running was in fact doing it “right.”

The blare of the starting horn sounded and we were off. Just like that, I was doing it. I was running a marathon. All those hours of training and sacrifice were culminating in this moment, which was, when I thought about it, somewhat mundane and ordinary. We’d paid all this money to run down a public street

with thousands of other people to participate in what was essentially a solo experience. We were running, but we weren’t engaging with each other.

what would she say if she could see me now? I had defied every negative thought. I had accomplished something that so few people ever would. The tears were cathartic, almost like a shedding of so much of the pain I’d been carrying for so long.

When I finished my first marathon, I felt like I had cracked the code to human existence. There was no shortage of runs that started with a problem that somehow got resolved over forty-five minutes of pounding the pavement. There were runs when I zoned out and thought of nothing, filling me with rare and unexpected moments of freedom. There were runs fueled by anger at past mistakes, my arms and legs charging forward so fast that I felt as though I were chasing myself, chasing my life.

Running taught me how to be embodied, to feel at home in myself.

Running was an anchor to a sense of self. And while the direction I was going wasn’t entirely clear, the course I was on was mine.

Eating fruits and vegetables instead of processed food made me feel full and light, and I ran lighter. I experimented with tempo workouts and fartlek runs and saw how two weeks later, the same workout felt easier. Do the inputs to get the outputs. I loved the simplicity of that.

I had a sense of being an observer more than a participant, someone outside the culture looking in. Running’s whiteness wasn’t only evident at major events; it permeated the sport. On every running website I went to—for shoes, for clothing, for advice—I saw white models in the ads and stories.

In high school, I never once considered running cross-country or the 1500 meters because I’d never seen a Black distance runner before. The images I was seeing in the media and in the running industry were of white people, which showed who could be a runner and who the industry thought distance running was for.

The running boom sprung from lily-white Oregon, so it was in fact coded white, this confirmed, from its very conception.

We weren’t talked about in the origin story of running. It was as if Black people weren’t there, didn’t even exist. Maybe I was wrong, but as I kept reading, all I found were stories that centered and celebrated white people, the image of distance running I had grown up with: white, male, thin, college-educated.

All you need are running shoes! Just show up, and It’s simple and accessible were common phrases. I recognized it as the same sentiment in the marketing materials at Team in Training: running was “for everybody.” But the “everybody” running called to, through its media, its marketing, and its image, didn’t include us. It was a clear example that white people lived in one world and Black people lived in another.

“White privilege,” wrote feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., in the journal Peace and Freedom in 1989, “is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.” It is carried by every white person, and allows them to be seen, centered, and feel normal at all times. It allows them to run.

When I lined up the dates of the boom, the Civil Rights Movement, and beyond into the 1970s and ’80s, they moved along parallel tracks, meaning we were fighting for our basic human rights while white people were starting to jog.

Wow, I thought. We were being killed in the streets while white people were taking to the streets to run. We couldn’t use a state park while white people were starting to jog in them.

I wondered, why are statues of Black icons only in Black neighborhoods? Why are our icons not American icons? Why, I wondered, does Frederick Douglass Boulevard, or Malcolm X Boulevard, run only the length of Harlem? Why do they not extend down into the rest of Manhattan?

In these early days, my most pressing question was: how do you grow community? I knew I made people feel comfortable and included, but how did I get people to show up to do a potentially daunting physical activity?

Then we were told to “expect the unexpected.” What this looked like in reality was running in fits and starts, through oncoming traffic, stopping whenever one of the cool kids decided there was something worth stopping for—a photo op by a bridge, a gallery show they heard was happening—never knowing when the run would be over. As soon as I recognized landmarks indicating we were back at the start, we got out of there.

What I learned by running with these groups was that the New York City running community was male-dominated and exclusionary at best.

At Team in Training, what would my experience have been like if someone had said hello that first day? If an effort had been made to make all of us feel like stars, not just the fast or experienced runners? I didn’t want anyone to feel invisible. I wanted to build a community that would be open to a wide range of paces and abilities. I wanted to create a sense of security and stability, meaning people would know what to expect. I wanted to build a community that would extend beyond my ego; a place that was not about me, but about us. A place where the sum of the parts was greater than any individual input.

All counseling looks at issues through a particular point of view or theoretical perspective—psychodynamic or cognitive, for example. The approach informs the way you interpret a client’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings and ultimately how you develop the treatment plan. Social justice counseling puts the individual within the context of society, meaning it doesn’t look only at what’s going on with you; it explores how what’s going with you is influenced by social forces like racism, sexism, white supremacy, transphobia, ableism, capitalism, and so on.

Some of the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness that led to my depression came from feeling like I didn’t fit a white ideal.

This was the power of the third space, a sociocultural term used to describe a transformative place where oppressed people plot or find their liberation. A place of unity. A place where folks like me can exhale. A place where we belong.

I had internalized the idea that being white and wealthy was right, somehow better. I had believed I was ugly and unattractive because I had consumed white beauty standards. I had believed wealth made people worthy, that it was a sign of how hard you’d worked, how good and deserving you must be. The narrative I’d been given was false and rooted in white supremacy.

I saw that all the feelings I’d been fighting—of being unattractive, out of place, worthless—had not simply been “my feelings.” Rather, the forces of white supremacy and patriarchy were feeding me those messages and I had swallowed them, turning my own inner thoughts against me.

There was nothing wrong with me. The problem was society. The problem was that I am a Black woman living in a patriarchal, white supremacist country that devalues me.

To what extent are individual white people responsible for upholding white supremacy if they, too, are ingesting and internalizing the same messages?

I resented that I was made to feel like I had to speak on behalf of the entire Black race while made to believe that I was less than. I resented that white people could go for a run with little regard for the space and place they occupied and a lack of awareness around their race. I resented white women who talked about feminism when what they were really talking about was white feminism. I resented that white people didn’t see the entitlement and privilege that comes with being white—and ultimately, that the racial work of our nation falls on the shoulders of Black people.

Later, we got into a conversation about work and wealth, and the white people in the class insisted that their parents were self-made; that the sole factor in their family’s wealth was hard work. My white peers refused to acknowledge that race affected the school they’d gone to, the loan or funding they’d received, the promotion they’d landed at work. Of course their parents had worked hard. But their skin color had also given them advantages that we did not and do not have. These two facts coexist.

I wasn’t prejudiced against white people; I was being harmed by white supremacy. White people’s ignorance and privilege angered me. That didn’t change. But what I hated was white supremacy, and the way it had made me think, the way it made other people think. I hated the racism it spawned, the racist system it had built. I hated that white supremacy and racism were a way of life in the United States.

I’d bought into stereotypes about African Americans, accepted the party line of “hard work” as the ticket to the American dream. I’d measured my looks, my success, and my worth off a racist system that refused to value me. On more than one occasion I had looked at homeless people on the street and thought they must’ve done something to deserve it. These were ugly truths to confront. I’d work for years—I still am today—to root out the white supremacy in me. But simply being aware of it was liberating. It allowed me to recognize when I was seeing myself in relation to whiteness and create space for me to see myself for who I was: a smart, beautiful, powerful, and complex Black woman.

Every identity—race, class, sexual orientation, body size, ability—either adds privilege or disadvantage to a person’s experience.

Only cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied white men with money can really pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They were handed the straps by way of gender and skin color and simply needed to pull, i.e., apply themselves. That’s not to say they don’t work hard or face barriers; it’s to say their gender and skin color grant them privileges based on these characteristics alone. Other forces like racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia limit a wide range of people to differing degrees. And while talent is distributed equally among all people, opportunity, resources, and privilege are not.

A culture rooted in dominance and hierarchy—where your identity exists in opposition to those you are made to believe you have power over—is exhausting and toxic. It puts you in the position of constantly having to prove your superiority, or another’s inferiority.

In the end, what I came away with was less self-pity and more empathy for myself and others. There are no Olympics for oppression, no gold medal for the most suffering. There are layers of privilege and layers of oppression. Every experience is different, and every experience is valid. What’s up to us is what we do with our privilege.

The experience gave me permission to be myself. I was aware that how other people saw and experienced me would always be something I’d be up against, but I also knew that I was not responsible for other people’s stereotyping, opinions, feelings, or actions. I will inhabit my body. I will take up space in the world. And I will do it in a way that centers my own comfort and joy.

One woman struggled with her weight and body image all her life and really wanted to be thin. But once she started running, she experienced the power of her body. Running opened her eyes to the truth that her body was so much more than its form and her focus became what her body could do, where it could take her. She was able to confidently reject that lie that patriarchy had fed her and create her own narrative.

Another woman had been in an unhappy marriage for twenty years. She stayed because she didn’t have a vision of what a different life could look like; being in the shadow of her partner was the only role she knew.

Daily hypervigilance due to racism and microaggressions is one reason for higher disease rates and increased stress levels in Black people, which leads to premature biological aging, a phenomenon known in the medical world as weathering.

He was happy to do his own thing. He was thrilled to see me shine. He didn’t feel threatened by my success. Instead, he bolstered me whenever he could.

We were so new and I had not quite allowed myself to see beyond the moment. Though in truth, I was adjusting to a new me—one that knew she deserved better. I had not valued myself enough until then to be with someone who valued me.